4.4 Theme three: Job demands encountered
4.4.1 Insufficient salary
The first sub theme pertains to insufficient salary received by the nurses. Salary was one of the prominent themes among the participants interviewed. Most of the nurses in this study felt that they are not paid enough for the type of work they are doing. Many mentioned that nursing is both stressful and demanding however the income that they receive is not equivalent to the work they do. Of the eight participants interviewed seven of the participants indicated that pay was not in proportion to the work performed hence salary shortage was highlighted as a demand.
Participant one simply stated:
“Above all doing this job we are earning peanuts you see”.
Participant two explained:
“I like to work with them even if the company can pay… we earning so little but at the end of the day we dedicate or time, we not working for money. Salary is very low and my transport is very high. I have to support at home and at the end of the the money is not enough. ...not that much because I told myself it will be ok
75
it’s not about the money. Even though I don’t earn much I don’t take it out on the child. I still enjoy coming to work”.
Participant three then went on to say:
“The way we work is not the way we getting salary. We getting salary less than our jobs but even though we not getting paid a lot we still love our jobs and we saying the little bit we getting we must thank god. The manager always tries to out increase even though it’s only R50. But even though it’s demanding I still love my job. Electricity water and groceries are scarce as we are and NGO and rely on government grants and donations”.
Participant four further explained:
“Sometimes like the money is not enough. I know we not working for money but we need money to survive”.
Similarly participant six said:
“We are doing a hard job and few of the people can work like this. I think that the money we get is not enough. We do hard work but w don’t get paid very much.
But we are hoping they are going to make it better but for how long do we have to wait. That is my point”.
76 Participant seven then stated:
“Maybe I can say that some of the other people that come here to work come only for the money not for the work. They have no love. Some of the people come to work but only because someone employed me. So what I am saying is our salary is not happy it is not enough for us. But I just accept it because I am a mother I can’t go anywhere else I can’t leave these children. Because I love them they got no mother. But you can see most of the time the staff come just for the money”.
And lastly participant eight revealed:
“Oh okay, ja let’s make an example, last month I only got nine hundred and fifty, ay, I asked them, they say a day is fifty something rand, ay I was so shocked when I get that money, because when I came here they told me about this one thousand two hundred, when I go to the office and ask them why I get this money, they say they count date until the twenty first because we get our salary on the twenty fifth, they say they count only the sixteen days I worked, they say because I’m also in the a probation, so I will get this money after three months then I can get this one hundred two hundred, ay but this salary because we do so much... low salary...ja I try to put that thing aside, I don’t think of it every time ja, I told myself that I don’t look at what I’m going to get if I do this, what am I going to get after. I don’t ja I just do my job”
77
There is not a great dealof literature that deals specifically with salary as a demand on its own. Rather literature groups salary as a physical demand. When this physical demand is experienced by employees it leads to a lack of work engagement. Therefore the current study brings to the forefront and highlights low salary as an important factor to be considered with regards to work engagement.
In a study conducted by Rothmann (2003) in South Africa there was a focus on engagement and burnout. “Burnout implies a rather long temporal process since it is based on the fact that the person has been working for a while and is experiencing a chronic misfit between self and work” (Rothmann, 2003, p.20).Burnout may occur for a number of reasons one of which is working long hours and being under paid.
Supplementing this work Maslach and Leiter (1997) formulated a model that centres on the degree of match or mismatch between the person and six domains of his or her job environment, one of these being a job demand which includes salary. The study went further to state that “insufficient reward involves a lack of appropriate rewards for the work people do. Both external rewards (e.g. salary and benefits) and internal rewards (pride in doing something of importance) could result in a mismatch” (Rothmann, 2003, p.20). Thus from the above it can be concluded that firstly a mismatch will occur if there is insufficient salary and secondly this will lead to negative consequences such as burnout as well as disengagement.
78
With regards to the Job demands resources model- one of the underlying psychological processes is the health impairment process. This process may be applied to this sub theme in that the participants in this study indicated previously that they do tend to leave work later then they are required and coupled with this insufficient salary this may lead to exhaustion in the employee which will ultimately have an effect on their wok engagement. This health impairment process may also have an effect on the resources that are available to the employee (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007)
From the supporting literature and the quotes from the participants interviewed it can be concluded that insufficient salary is a serious demand that can result in negative consequences. It can have a negative effect on the employee’s resources as well as their experiences of work engagement. However and more importantly the current study also finds that the participants indicated that whilst salary is a demand this does not hinder their experiences of work engagement. This does pose a problem in that many of the participants are breadwinners and have children to support. They do however feel engagement stemming from the love of their jobs. Thus the demand does not have an effect on either their resources or their experiences of work engagement.